


Let It Get Away

by ThisDominionIsMine



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Christmas, Gen, Secret Santa Fic, and a really fugly tree, and also some really terrible/questionable headgear, and hot chocolate and snickerdoodle cookies, grad/college students at christmas, there's a pillow fort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-05-08 14:03:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5499866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisDominionIsMine/pseuds/ThisDominionIsMine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mad Max Secret Santa fic for dwarrowdamned/santa-max's War Rig Family Christmas request!<br/>PhDs wait for no man, but Valkyrie is no man, and it's Christmas Eve. It's kind of hard for Furiosa to disagree when there are already nine people in the apartment and Angharad is baking cookies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Let It Get Away

**Author's Note:**

  * For [justalotoffeelings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/justalotoffeelings/gifts).



“You do know tomorrow’s Christmas, right?”

“Tell that to my dissertation.”

Valkyrie waits precisely long enough for Furiosa to realize that she has made a horrible mistake, then grabs the back of her chair, drags her away from her desk, and slips into the space to stare down Furiosa’s open laptop. “Furiosa’s dissertation,” she says to eleven internet tabs, three Excel sheets, and a word document. “Tomorrow is Christmas and she needs to spend it doing something besides staring at you. Thank you for your cooperation. Bye-bye now.”

Furiosa bull-rushes her, gets elbowed in the chin and then taken out at the knees, and decides to cut her losses before Valkyrie hip-checks her out a window. “Save those files or I pour acid on your hard drive.”

“You and what laboratory?” Valkyrie snipes, but she taps the keyboard and clicks away in such a manner that Furiosa doesn’t stroke out about losing five hours of work. “Now that I’ve said that, Dag probably knows where to get some.”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking.” Furiosa shoves herself up from the floor. She pokes at her prosthetic to make sure nothing was damaged in the scuffle, then whacks Valkyrie’s shoulder with it. “So. Christmas.”

Valkyrie closes Furiosa’s laptop and turns to smile. “Indeed.”

“You… have something planned?”

“Indeed.”

“And this plan is…?”

“Excellent.”

Furiosa sits back down in her desk chair. “Do I have to talk to people?”

“Not at all, if you don’t want to.”

Furiosa shuts her eyes and sighs. “Fine.”

They both jump when someone pounds on the front door hard enough to rattle the walls. “I was promised a _pillow fort_ ,” Toast thunders, so loud she could be standing in the room with them.

Furiosa groans and folds her metal arm over her face. “I hate you.”

Someone pulls Toast away from the door, and then Angharad’s voice pipes through. “We have ginger cookies, and brought the stuff for snickerdoodle ones.”

Valkyrie beams at Furiosa.

“Fine, _fine_. Just let me put on pants.”

Valkyrie skips out of the room.

***

Seattle doesn’t really understand the concept of snow. Last year, they got a thick dusting at the end of November and half the city shut down while the other half promptly forgot how to drive anything with wheels. And the hills become outright murderous if they get too iced-up.

Johannesburg doesn’t generally get snow, either, and December is in the middle of their summer anyway, so Furiosa has never seen a white Christmas. Which is fine, because Christmas is an overly-politicized and commercialized holiday, and snow requires cold weather, and cold weather makes her joints stiff and her stump ache, and it’s easier to value the day as the midway point of her two-week break than as something to blow an aneurysm about decorating and buying presents for.

Presents. Shit.

By the time Furiosa makes it into the kitchen, Angharad already has flour all over her hands and the ratty flannel she borrowed from Valkyrie. Her knuckles are knobby and swollen. Toast, in a black shirt featuring the Grumpy Cat wearing a Santa hat, nudges her out from in front of the bowl of dough and takes over the mixing without saying a word.

“Final-grading-itis?” Valkyrie guesses. She has half a cookie stashed in her cheek, another in her right hand, and is digging mugs for hot chocolate out of the cabinet with her left.

“Fifty-two tests – four paragraph-length short answers and two essays, administered Friday afternoon,” Angharad says. “I finished at three in the morning on Monday.” She spreads her hands and looks down at them. “They might be okay by the time classes start again.”

Toast snorts. “The professor for my Stats class was complaining about the Monday grading deadline. Her exam was on Tuesday.”

Dag doesn’t even bother to knock: she sweeps in through the unlocked front door with Cheedo at her heel, both dripping. “It’s raining,” Dag announces, then cheerfully inserts herself into their conversation like she’s got a bug planted in the kitchen wall: “The only final I had to administer was all Scantrons.” She’s wearing a Santa hat that is impossibly dry.

“Because you TA’d an _easy_ science class,” Cheedo complains. “I got a sixty percent on my O-Chem final, and that was _above_ the curve. Half the class isn’t going to pass.”

Angharad takes a steaming mug from Valkyrie with two hands and a wry smile. “Political Science,” she advertises: “You only fail if you never show up to lecture and ignore all the readings.”

“Didn’t Nux fail some Poli Sci midterm and then went and begged mercy from his TA until he got half his points back?” Toast sucks dough off of her fingertips and whacks Valkyrie with the spoon when she tries to sneak some. Valkyrie sniffs haughtily and removes the mug of hot chocolate that she had just set down in front of Toast. There’s a brief standoff featuring molten chocolate and a wooden spoon as possible weapons that Furiosa breaks down by stealing a fingertip-load of dough and then locking her metal hand around the spoon.

“Chocolate for dough,” she orders.

“Give me some marshmallows with it or you’ll never see this dough again,” Toast warns.

Furiosa looks at Valkyrie, who scrunches up her face, then rummages around in a different cabinet for the marshmallows that she then proceeds to launch at Toast’s head. Cheedo squeals. Toast catches the bag with one hand still wrapped around the spoon, then jerks her chin at the counter. Valkyrie sets the mug down gently and steps back.

“Thank you,” Toast says. She lets Furiosa have the spoon, which she promptly trades Valkyrie for two ginger cookies.

“I know Nux’s TA,” Angharad says. “He spent two hours begging for his grade. Went in with a score of fifty percent, came out with an eighty, did fine on the final.”

Cheedo makes an unhappy noise. “That’s more points than I’ve gotten back in my entire _life_.”

“Darling,” Toast says, “you’re not a cute white boy with puppy-dog eyes. The world doesn’t work that way for us.”

Dag has an evil cackle.

Seattle seems to have a disproportionately large number of Australians, but that may just be because Furiosa lives with Valkyrie, who appears to find another one of her countrymen with every week that she lives the city. She, Dag, Cheedo, and Max seem to come from four very different corners of the continent, for all that Furiosa can’t name three Australian cities without the help of the Internet. Valkyrie’s from the South Australian Outback, Max from Canberra, the capital. Cheedo’s from somewhere in the west, and Dag is out of one of those cities people actually tend to know. Perth? Sydney? Brisbane? One of the ones in the east, that’s all Furiosa can recall. She’s also the single most Australian person Furiosa has ever met, from the accent to the weird sayings she peppers her speech with to the general _air_ of “I have made peace with the untold number of creatures that are designed by my homeland to kill me, and subsequently have devoted my life to playing with the building blocks of creation with the intention of someday taking over the world with an army of godless poisonous things”.

Furiosa may be slightly unnerved by Dag sometimes.

Toast is fine. Toast is from Los Angeles. Toast is loud and occasionally obnoxious and smart as a whip and hasn’t ever pretended to be fazed by Furiosa’s arm or Valkyrie’s knife collection, and she’s pretty good for drinking and yelling about politicians with.

Angharad’s a Brit who has been in the US a solid ten years and still has the tiniest hitch of an accent under her voice. She had a gap before she became a grad student here – a long gap, a “got married, got pregnant, lost the baby, got divorced” kind of gap, but she’s here now, trying to fix the world one vehemently-targeted paper at a time.

Like Toast, Cheedo is still in undergrad. She wants to be a doctor, and maybe the fact that she has not only survived two and a half years of biology and chemistry but is on the dean’s list is proof that she’s tough enough to make it, for all that she’s so small and quiet and needs to add five or ten kilos and stop dating terrible boys.

Too late, Furiosa realizes that Cheedo is staring back at her. “What are you TA’ing next?” she asks, and Furiosa is pretty sure it’s not the first time the question has been repeated.

“I’ll be teaching one of the smaller Intro Macro sections,” she says. “One of the ones that’s thirty people, not two hundred.”

“Pity the children who don’t realize what they’ve signed up for,” Valkyrie says.

Furiosa rolls her eyes and drinks her hot chocolate and doesn’t respond. Angharad has rejoined Toast to lump the cookie dough into squashed balls on a couple of trays while the oven that is older than Furiosa and Valkyrie combined groans and creaks as it ticks towards the desired temperature.

Dag sidles up next to her. “You don’t have a tree,” she announces. The white pom-pom on her hat bounces disapprovingly.

Furiosa points at the scrawny plastic one next to the coffee pot. It’s as tall as her forearm is long. “Came with lights and everything.”

Dag gives her a look like she’s broken a law of nature, but the door opens again before she can actually get any words out. It’s Capable: a bright mess of red hair, dragging Nux and Max along by their elbows.

Furiosa looks over her shoulder for Valkyrie. “We don’t have _room_ in this _apartment_ for nine people,” she hisses.

Valkyrie pats her cheek on her way over to hug Capable. “Just drink your chocolate, Fury.”

To be fair, Max looks about as thrilled to be here as Furiosa is to have so many people over. He’s shaking the water out of his hair and trying to pat down his cowlick while stripping off his rain shell, and he’s not having a good time with any of it. Furiosa walks over and yanks on the sweatshirt hood that’s hanging down his back.

“You know they make those so you’ll use them, right?”

Max makes an incomprehensible grumbling noise at her and yanks his sleeves down so they cover his knuckles. Then he tucks his chin down behind the collar of his sweatshirt and glowers at her.

Furiosa holds out one of the cookies she got from Valkyrie. “Ginger. Angharad and Toast made them.”

Max squints, takes the cookie, then flicks his eyes over her shoulder. Furiosa turns around just in time to catch Capable’s hug with her chest instead of her shoulder.

“I haven’t seen you in _weeks_ ,” Capable says. “You’re worse than Toast.”

Toast calls from the kitchen: “Do you _want_ to see the program I spent the last month writing?”

“Want to see my spreadsheets?” Furiosa yells back over Capable’s head. Nux, in the corner of her vision, looks terrified. “I have poverty statistics from a hundred and ninety-”

“Every time Furiosa talks about her thesis someone gets to throw a pillow at her,” Valkyrie announces.

“Do you want to know how many lines of code I wrote and proofread?” Toast pokes her head out of the kitchen just to brandish her spoon at Furiosa. “How many goddamn _bugs_ I had to yank out?”

Capable growls out of her chest as she lets go of Furiosa. When Furiosa goes to open her mouth again, she throws her hands in the air and announces, “Me and Nux are getting a puppy!” loud enough for half the building to hear.

There’s a slight pause.

Max clears his throat. “What kind?”

“Aussie,” Nux says. “Aussie Shepard.”

Max thinks about this, then nods. “Good dog.”

“When?” Cheedo asks.

Capable shrugs. “May-ish? Litter hasn’t been born yet; we just met the mother yesterday.” She shoves a chunk of hair out of her face only to have it fall over her eyes again three seconds later. “Her eyes are different colors – you’d like her, Val.”

“I like all dogs that aren’t small enough to be crushed underfoot,” Valkyrie says. “You guys want hot chocolate?”

Capable and Nux both perk up and follow her into the kitchen. Max throws his rain shell onto a hook by the door and then perches awkwardly on the arm of the ugly, tan-colored, fifty-dollar sofa Valkyrie bought because “there’s only one kind of suspicious stain”. (And then Furiosa managed to get a bloody lip helping her drag the thing up two flights of stairs into the apartment, and there has been at least a gallon of coffee, tea, and water spilled on various places, plus a spattering of shitty hard lemonade that is 100% the fault of Donald Trump. But it was, after all, a fifty-dollar couch.)

“How’s the arm?”

Furiosa blinks. “Doesn’t like the rain.” She drops her gaze to the brace strapped on over his boot and jeans. “How’s the knee?”

Max shrugs. “Permanent.”

Furiosa nods and sits down on the other side of the couch. She rests her mug against her breastbone. “How was that “professional environment” seminar?”

Max makes a disgusted noise.

“Was your resume up to snuff?” She grins. “Did you look appropriately attentive in the fake interviews?”

Max leans down to wipe water off of his brace with his sweatshirt sleeve. “I’ll pass,” is all he says. Then, after a pause: “Probably.”

Furiosa smiles. “That bad?”

He grunts.

In the kitchen, the oven beeps.

Furiosa doesn’t know a lot about Max besides the bad knee and the steady progress towards a Masters in Mechanical Engineering (and that he throws a hell of a punch). But he’s not the worst person to talk to.

***

“Seriously, once you’ve been in one army, you’ve been in all of them. Same food, same shit-for-brains grunts, same terrible superiors. Same godawful deployments.” Valkyrie points across the coffee table. “Fury. Iraq. Verify.”

Furiosa shrugs without taking her eyes off her cards. “It was Baghdad in 2003. If it wasn’t too hot, it was too cold. Everything hurt. Nationality didn’t change that.”

“Remind me again,” Toast says, “why a white girl from South Africa decided to join the United States military on the eve of an invasion that everybody now recognizes was a terrible idea?”

Furiosa twitches her eyebrows and doesn’t smile. “When I have an answer that doesn’t suck, I’ll call you.”

Valkyrie clears her throat. “ _I_ did it for the money. And to get away from my parents. And to piss them off.”

Toast flaps a hand at her. “You were an Australian joining the Australian army. You’re boring.”

“You’ve never left the United States,” Dag observes.

Toast throws a marshmallow at her, which she catches between two fingers and then eats.

It’s still raining. There’s an old Mythbusters Christmas special on the TV – one about trees. Furiosa, Angharad, Nux, and Cheedo are playing hearts. Cheedo is winning. Dag may be helping her via witchcraft.  Valkyrie has been consuming too much sugar and can no longer stop her knee from bouncing relentlessly, so they’ve made her drag her desk chair out of her room and sit in it so she doesn’t make the whole couch vibrate. Max may be the only person who is actually watching the TV – he’s finally moved onto the couch proper and has procured a notebook from somewhere that he’s sketching in, one foot up on the coffee table, one eye on the screen. Dag is sitting in the space between the coffee table and couch so Toast can braid her hair, and the laws of physics should dictate that she can’t see anyone’s cards, but she’s making strange expressions at Cheedo every time she goes to put a card down, so Valkyrie’s pretty sure her hypothesis isn’t groundless.

Dag’s Santa hat has been removed and placed on the end of the coffee table next to Max’s foot. Valkyrie sweeps it up and plants it on Capable’s head. Capable rolls her eyes, then moves the cap to Nux’s head and pats his cheek when he jumps. “Keep that bald head warm and dry.” Her face turns towards Furiosa so she can wink.

Furiosa levels a deadpan stare back at her.

Since she’s standing anyway, Valkyrie snags another cookie. “I know I have reindeer antlers somewhere in my room.”

“Nobody asked you,” Furiosa mutters.

Toast sprouts a grin like a devil with a mission. “Can we please see the reindeer antlers, Valkyrie?”

“I’ll see if I can find them.” Valkyrie throws herself down again, then kicks off the coffee table and rides her chair back into her room.

She actually has three pairs, and another one of those Santa hats. There’s also a halo that she wound tinsel and some green and yellow Mardi Gras beads around at some point when she was procrastinating on another project a few weeks earlier, so she carts it all out into the living room. Cheedo gets the halo. Capable actually wants a pair of the antlers. Valkyrie drops the Santa Hat on top of Max’s head and he rolls one defeated eyeball at her, but that’s the extent of his protest. Dag and Toast get involved in a conversation about how to use Dag’s hair to better hold the second set of antlers in place, and Valkyrie shrugs and crowns herself with the third and final pair after one glance at Furiosa’s expression.

Angharad has been quiet for the last little while: she’s sitting on the floor at the opposite end of the coffee table, studiously counting cards. Valkyrie pushes off the wall and then the TV stand to wheel her way over. “How you doing?”

“Tired,” Angharad says. “It’s been a long year.” She tosses the Queen of Spades onto the table, and Cheedo groans loudly, throws down the Ace, and collects the cards in a huff.

Valkyrie bites at a corner of her thumbnail. “Sure as hell.” She watches the next three tricks go by: Cheedo takes twin loads of Hearts, and then Furiosa realizes what’s happening and slides out a ten over her nine to kill her moon-shooting aspirations. That done, Valkyrie leans over to tap her prosthetic wrist. “Should we get a real tree?”

Furiosa gives her The Eyeball. “It’s Christmas Eve.”

Across the couch, Max snorts. “There’s nothing left.”

“I’m just sayin’.”

“There’s probably _something_ left,” Capable says.

“Something shorter than me and scrawnier than Cheedo,” Toast snarks.

Nux shrugs his big puppy shoulders. “Easier to get up the stairs.”

“Where would you put it?” Angharad asks.

“It’s only going to need, like, four square feet.”

Dag wrinkles her nose. “Not if you want to take care of it properly.”

“I’m not trying to raise a family with it, Mz. Botanist.”

“With us taking care of it, it’ll be dead in a week anyway,” Furiosa mutters.

“It’s still light outside,” Cheedo says. “If we go now they’ll probably still be open.”

“Who’s _they_?” Toast demands. “Where does one actually buy a Christmas tree in Seattle?”

Four different people yank out their phones. Cheedo gets there first: “There’s a place in Greenwood. Fifteen minutes to drive.”

“I have a tree stand you could use,” Dag says.

Furiosa sets her cards down in her lap, knuckles at her temples, and mutters “help me” under her breath. Then: “Are all nine of us going to go pick out a tree?”

“You can fit eight in the War Rig, can’t you?” Capable says. “The tree will go on top anyway.”

Furiosa groans.

Valkyrie pats her metal wrist. “Who wants to ride in the trunk?”

***

The War Rig is a giant black beast of a Suburban, sixteen years old and a grossly fuel-inefficient blight on Seattle’s eco-friendly green glow. Nux and Cheedo play rock-paper-scissors for the trunk and Nux wins, so he cheerfully hauls himself over the second row of the backseat and stretches out, head just below the line of the window in case any cops happen to pass behind them. His Santa hat is all that’s visible in the rearview.

For the crime of recommending this adventure in the first place, Furiosa kicks Valkyrie out of shotgun and assigns the position to Max, partly because he’s willing to plug his phone into the speakers and let its GPS do the talking instead of trying to give her verbal directions. The girls are all still wearing their headgear, and Furiosa starts out thinking that Max has simply forgotten his hat, but then he lifts his hand to steady it when she has to slam on the brakes at a short yellow, and taps a finger against his lips when she grins at him.

It doesn’t take long for Toast and Dag to start singing a heavily-edited version of “Dashing Through the Snow” that, in the nature of all horrible things, promptly gets stuck on loop in Furiosa’s brain. It starts with _Dashing through the snow/On a pair of broken skis/Over the hills we go/Smashing into trees_ and does not improve from there, and Furiosa has contemplated forcing them to walk home by the time they reach the nursery.

She’s not a hundred percent certain that the place is open at first. The sun is creeping closer to the horizon behind its mask of clouds, there are only a fistful of trees left on the lot, and the storefront appears uninhabited until Capable pounds on the little desktop bell and a tall black woman clutching a steaming mug to her chest shuffles out of the office.

Furiosa hangs at the back of the train as the woman leads them to the last cluster of trees, the biggest one barely level with the top of Angharad’s head. Max hangs back with her, hands stuffed into his pockets, Santa hat getting progressively soggier with each passing minute.

Furiosa watches the girls (plus Nux) pack in around the trees, pointing across each other and standing on their toes to better examine them. “I met you in a bar fight,” she says.

Max snorts and lets his mouth twitch towards a smile.

Furiosa knocks their shoulders together and nods at the antlered, halo-ed, and hatted crowd in front of them. “Met you in a bar fight; now we’re here.”

“You started it,” Max says.

Furiosa shrugs. “Nobody made you join.”

He shakes his dripping Santa pom-pom at her, then looks forward again. “They’re going to be there all day.”

Furiosa shifts her weight onto one hip and pulls her jacket sleeve over the knuckles of her metal hand. The jacket itself is two sizes too big for most of her, but the sleeve fits over her prosthetic, keeping rust off the metal and oil in the joints instead of on the ground. From what she can overhear, Cheedo, Capable, and Valkyrie are trying to argue for a tall one, while Toast wants one of the ones she can actually reach the top of. Furiosa watches Dag lay a hand on the shortest tree left, which _is_ shorter than Toast, but still possesses a reasonable number of needles and branches, and knows that they’re done.

“Thirty bucks,” says the tree-seller. “You need rope to tie it down with?”

“We have bungee cords,” Valkyrie says, and passes her the money with a smile.

One person could easily carry the tree if it weren’t so bottom-heavy, but Valkyrie and Nux put their long legs to good use getting the thing on top of the War Rig. Cheedo claims the trunk for the ride home, everyone else stuffs themselves into whatever space is available, and they’re off again.

Thirty seconds after she starts the engine, Capable is leaning forwards to poke Furiosa’s shoulder. “Do you have any ornaments?”

Max makes a face out the windshield, and Furiosa tries not to snort. “I think we have some bead strings and tinsel.”

“I have a box of things,” Angharad offers. “I’ll run upstairs and grab it once we’re back.”

Dag does, too: “I’ll bring mine with the tree stand.”

“Do you have one that will fit?” Nux asks.

Dag shoots him such a withering look that Furiosa really does snort when she glances at the rearview. “It’ll fit.”

“That’s what she said.”

Max yanks off his drenched Santa hat and throws it at Toast’s head without turning around. Furiosa flinches, then punches his shoulder with her flesh-and-bone hand, and he sinks down in his seat. The hat comes flying forwards again to ping off the windshield and into his lap.

“Throw that hat again and I throw you out of the car,” she hisses.

Toast whoops.

***

They lose Dag and Angharad as soon as they get back to the apartment building, which turns out fine because Cheedo is the one who suggests that they just stick the tree in the elevator instead of trying to haul it up eight flights of stairs. It’s so wide it barely fits through the doors, but with Capable pulling, Max pushing, and Furiosa risking the loss of an eye to hold the angrily-dinging doors open, they yank it through and leave a shower of needles behind.

“That floor hasn’t been vacuumed since this place was built,” Valkyrie says when Capable starts to look guilty on the ride up. “And they’ll leave a nice smell.”

Getting the tree out of the elevator is almost as bad as getting it in, but shoving it through the door of the apartment probably comes closer to plant-torture than anything before. Everyone who actually touches the tree has their hands covered with sap by the time they’ve got it balanced in its stand, requiring Dag to produce some kind of weird sap-solvent that smells like oranges.

Furiosa doesn’t touch the tree, because Furiosa has a hand made of metal and rubber and wire that takes multiple hours to clean, and because this was all Valkyrie’s idea in the first place. She does give it a good long eyeball while everyone else is scrubbing sap off their hands with Dag’s potion, though. And what she decides is, “That is not four square feet.”

“Probably eight or ten,” Angharad agrees. “Maybe twelve.”

“It still has to settle,” Dag says. “It’ll spread out more then.”

Valkyrie catches Furiosa’s eye and offers up a Cheshire Cat grin.

Furiosa rubs at her temples, looks out the window at the abruptly-darkened sky, strips off her jacket, takes a snickerdoodle cookie, plants herself on the couch next to Max, kicks her feet up onto the coffee table, and goes to sleep without even meaning to.

***

“She works too much,” Valkyrie says. “Let her be.”

Angharad takes one of the roaming Santa hats that is sitting unattended on the table, places it carefully on Furiosa’s head, pats the pom-pom, then points at the big plastic case she brought from her apartment and the rickety cardboard box Dag hauled down along with the tree stand, then says, “I think there’s enough to cover most of it, between the two of us.”

Dag looks like she might protest about not giving the tree enough time to rest or spread its wings or something, but she sighs and nods instead of opening her mouth, and the rest of their party dives in headfirst.

None of Dag’s stuff looks younger than ten or fifteen years: most of it is carved wooden figurines of horses and fish and people, or three-dimensional stars made out of brass pieces that fit together in funny ways. Angharad’s tends to be a little newer, and there are shiny baubles between the stuffed cloth animals and ceramic penguins and miniature trees.

Max sits on the couch with his knee leaning against Furiosa’s and watches, mostly. When Valkyrie drags out an immense tangle of green, red, and silver bead strings, she drops it in his lap with a wink and a “Thanks, darling.” He sighs and gets to work.

As soon as the first string is a distinct unit from the rest, Cheedo sweeps in to grab it. “What’s your family doing for Christmas?” she asks.

Max hesitates. “Don’t have one.”

“Oh.” She stops. “I’m sorry.”

He shrugs it off. “Yours?”

“There’ll be about twenty people in the house right now.” She folds the beads around her hand, over and over and over again. “I just couldn’t afford to fly home this year.”

“I stopped going back after my first year here,” Dag says, long threads of tinsel strung between her fingers. “No point in the summer – _our_ summer. Not enough time in the winter.”

Valkyrie takes the beads from Cheedo. “When my mom wants to see me, she flies out here. She’s retired, I’m not; it’s only fair.”

“I barely go back to California once a year anymore,” Toast offers. “I’m home for a week, and I remember why I left.”

“Same,” Capable says, and smiles when they high-five. “It’s adulthood, Cheedo. It happens.”

Max flicks the next bead string at Nux. “You?”

Nux fumbles the catch, but the beads sling themselves over his shoulder anyway. “The only people left in Detroit are… are not in a good way. My parents are in New York. Half my friends from growing up are in jail.”

Angharad gets a funny smile on her face. “I’ve got a few people in jail, too.” She smooths her hand over her belly briefly, then lets it drop. “If I’ve got a family, it’s in this apartment.” She looks at Max and shrugs one shoulder. “Happens.”

Capable hangs a skiing penguin on one of the tree’s lower branches before she hugs Angharad. Toast piles on next, and then Dag and Cheedo. Max looks at Nux and Valkyrie, then at Furiosa.

Nux shoves his hat’s pom-pom out of his face, takes a deep breath and says, “Feels like a family,” and then somehow the group hug envelops him, too.

Valkyrie leans against the arm of the couch next to Max’s shoulder and adjusts the hat on Furiosa’s head. “Ankle-biters,” she says.

Max huffs and hands her the next string of beads.

***

Furiosa wakes up to the words, “Toast was saying something about a pillow fort?” and someone waving a plate of Valkyrie’s homemade fried rice under her nose. Capable’s the one asking about the pillow fort. Max is the one waving the rice.

“I fell asleep?”

“A little.”

Furiosa puts her hand on Max’s face and pushes him away, then grabs the plate in her prosthetic. “Thank you. How long was I out?”

“Almost three hours,” Toast says. “Stand up; we need the cushion you’re sitting on to be a wall.”

“ _I’ll_ be your wall,” Furiosa grumbles, but she stands up anyway. A Santa hat tumbles off her head. The tree is a riot of sparkles and color and tiny, pretty things. She jams a mouthful of rice into her face and wanders over as Dag snaps open a bedsheet to span the walls of the fortress. There’s a horrific amount of tinsel present on the tree, and every vaguely string-oriented object ever owned by anyone in their little collective appears to have been strung, spangled, crisscrossed, or otherwise suspended from the tree to make up for the lack of obnoxious ornaments. Max – also kicked off the couch – comes to stand next to her. He makes a tiny confused noise in his throat before he reaches past her to touch a small silver music box with the tip of one finger.

“Whose is this? The box?”

Angharad clears her throat. “Mine.”

“Does it play?”

“Yes.”

Max nods and straightens up again, shifting his weight off his bad knee. He looks at Furiosa, at Angharad, then back at the tree. “I’ve seen one before. Years ago.”

“Yeah,” Angharad says. “I’ve had that one for a long time, too.”

The moment stretches.

Furiosa eats more rice and walks into the kitchen, leaving them to it. Cheedo is in there, drinking tea. Valkyrie is poking at another pan of rice on the stove.

“It turned out pretty,” Valkyrie says without turning around. “I feel like this was a good use of a day.”

Furiosa grunts and leans against the counter. She cleans off some more of her plate before she figures out how she wants to phrase her question: “How many people are spending the night?”

Cheedo freezes like a baby deer caught in her headlights.

Valkyrie shrugs. “I was going to drag out all our spare blankets so we could have a campout in the living room. Dag brought some of hers while you were asleep.”

Furiosa nods. She eats more rice.

***

In the end, everyone stays. Even Max. Furiosa winds up sitting against one of the couch-cushion walls, staring at a Netflix-archived episode of Star Trek, listening to the sounds of rain and people sleeping, itching at her stump as she tries to determine the technical difference between “falling asleep when others are awake” and “being the last person to fall asleep” and why there appears to be such an unbridgeable gulf between the two. Two episodes later, she hasn’t figured it out.

She finds herself in the kitchen again, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, picking at missed flecks of rice and vegetables on the stove and counting minutes until sunrise. Then she goes back to look at the tree. Even in the dark, it’s shiny.

There is a line of people stretched across the floor under a patchwork of blankets, only two-thirds of them under the cover of the blanket/pillow fort. The lump at the end of the line sits up.

“Just me,” she murmurs. “Go back to sleep.”

Max shakes his head, does a grumbly kind of grunt, and heaves himself to his feet. He shuffles over to her through the dark.

“I couldn’t sleep.”

Max nods.

Furiosa picks at the hem of her blanket. “Thanks for coming over.”

“You didn’t want us here.” Max squints at her.

She stares at the tree. “Didn’t say that.”

He rolls his eyes, and his whole head with them. He turns away from her to wander over to the coffee table and pluck his notebook off it, then returns to her side. The book falls open in his hands before he passes it to her. The first ten pages of the thing are covered with designs and mechanisms that could be applied to her prosthetic with readily-available materials. “If you ever want to tweak it…” Max trails off, then shrugs. “Happy Christmas?”

Furiosa tucks the notebook under her right arm, then lifts her stump to hook around Max’s ribcage and tucks her chin over his shoulder. “Thank you.” She pauses. “I don’t have anything. For anyone.”

Max grunts and taps the notebook. “That’s all I had.”

Furiosa smiles. “I won’t tell.” When she steps back, she nods at the snoring line. “We need some rest. Come on.”

Valkyrie doesn’t fully wake up when Furiosa lies down and presses their spines together; she reaches one arm back, pats her hip, then lets the arm flop forward and drops off again. Max curls up facing Furiosa, blanket drawn up to his chin. He gives her one amused eyebrow-twitch before he shuts his eyes. Furiosa takes a deep breath, leans a little more against Valkyrie, and closes hers.

***

Furiosa wakes up and it’s Christmas. Furiosa wakes up and there are nine people in the apartment. Furiosa wakes up and Angharad is making pancakes and bacon. Furiosa wakes up and it is still raining. Furiosa wakes up and they have a tree that is short and ugly and beautiful and perfect. Furiosa wakes up and there is already coffee ready.

Furiosa wakes up, and it’s Christmas.

She stands in the kitchen with her stump bare, a mug of coffee in her hand, watching Toast beat Nux and Dag at Scrabble, and it’s Christmas, and everyone’s okay.

“I should really work on my dissertation,” she says.

Capable threads her elbow around Furiosa’s stump and knocks their shoulders together. “I think it can wait one more day.”

Max wanders past them with half a strip of bacon hanging out of his mouth, Santa hat jammed onto his head, cowlick firmly sticking up behind it.

Furiosa sips at her coffee. “Perhaps.”


End file.
